There are lots of package deliveries this time of year. When shopping online, companies are great about telling you when to expect the delivery of your purchase. Fraudsters know this and prey on unsuspecting victims especially during this time of year.

Scammers send smishing texts (smishing is just like phishing, but through a text), that embeds malicious code into a link in the text that can infect your phone or try to get victims to provide personal information or financial information.

It is such a problem, that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently issued an Alert to provide tips to avoid these scams.

The tips include:

What to do

• If you get a message about an unexpected package delivery that tells you to click on a link for some reason, don’t click.
• If you think the message might be legitimate, contact the shipping company using a phone number or website you know is real. Don’t use the information in the message.
• If you think it could be about something you recently ordered, go to the site where you bought the item and look up the shipping and delivery status there.
• No matter the time of year, it always pays to protect your personal information. Check out these resources to help you weed out spam text messages, phishing emails, and unwanted calls.

These are helpful tips any time of year, but particularly right now.